“ Findanci lost a daughter-in-law in last week‘s earthquake that killed more than 13,000 and left 200,000 homeless. His picturesque home town lost its popular seaside promenade as most of it sank into the sea. Degirmendere is a particularly graphic example of the kind of haphazard property development that made northwest Turkey so vulnerable to the earthquake of August 17, and of the heartbreaking and grisly clean-up that has followed. The town square still gently slopes down to the sea but as it nears the water‘s edge, the tarmac and earth are riven with cracks, some of them wider than a hand. Waves wash over a shattered ornamental fountain. „The park used to slope down and then reach an area that is silted up. People began to expand it and build on it over the years,“ said Mehmet Guner, a former municipal clerk, who was distributing tents and medicine. Degirmendere appeared to have lost a chunk of its coastline some 250-300 metres long and 60 metres wide, all of it now submerged. Trees and branches poked up from the water. At the water‘s edge, a team of volunteer divers were preparing to search the flooded area for more bodies. „There were supposed to be four people in the hotel and an earlier diving team reported seeing a leg down there. We are going to look around that point,“ said Resul, strapping a scuba tank over his wetsuit. Later he resurfaced, frustrated. „There is a huge amount of wreckage down there. There is a leg sticking out, but we would need a winch to free it.“ Municipal officials say almost two-thirds of Degirmendere‘s population of 45,000 have left town since the earthquake. However, many of its old wooden houses escaped the devastation visited on Golcuk, just four km (three miles) away, where buildings crumbled like houses of cards. Degirmendere‘s streets were deserted, though there were about 40 or 50 people in standard-issue yellow rain jackets, mostly young men, lining up for bread, water and medical supplies being distributed by municipal workers operating from a makeshift office exposed to the rain. At mid-morning, a group of 15 U.S. Marines arrived in the town, carrying with them plans for a tent city to temporarily house the homeless.